Multicultural, multi-age, and cross-curricular learning activities, debates are employed in classrooms around the world with students from upper elementary to higher education in subjects such as Language Arts, Social Studies, and Economics. Typically, in a debate, “an opinion must be clearly stated, supported by reasoning and evidence, and defended against conflicting views” (Branham, 1991, p. 1). Debates are generally proceduralized, competitive, and oral face-to-face (f2f ) activities (e.g., the one-on-one Lincoln-Douglas or the four-on-four Canadian National debate formats). Empowering and dialogical, debates provide students with opportunities to develop their critical thinking skills. Although defined variously, critical thinking skills include analyzing, evaluating, and inferring (Delamain & Spring, 2021; Facione, 1990).
As an alternative to f2f debates, teachers can facilitate unstructured, casual-like, and asynchronous written debates using the free-of-charge, cross-platform, user-friendly Kialo Edu (KE) website (https://www.kialo-edu.com/). KE-mediated debates can alleviate stresses and issues associated with f2f oral debates, such as time pressure and stage fright, and provide an experience in which students can learn how to voice reasoned opinions assertively, critique opposing perspectives civilly, and construct multidisciplinary knowledge socially.
When teachers use Kialo Edu, students also develop argumentative writing skills that mirror debating skills—supporting a stance (i.e., a thesis) with reasons and evidence, and addressing opposing viewpoints (Hillocks, 2011; Irvin, 2010). Equipped with these skills, students can perform essential personal and academic tasks, such as evaluating the credibility of social media posts, inferring friends’ feelings from their SMS messages, and composing essays. This article highlights some of KE’s advantageous and intuitive features and provides recommendations for conducting KE-mediated debates.
Advantageous Features
With KE’s straightforward features, teachers can easily create classroom debates. To do so, a teacher clicks the New icon and then has two options: select a prompt or create their own. The 600+ compelling, ready-made prompts are categorized by topic (e.g., Just for Fun, History or Economics) and age range (8 – 10, 11 – 13, 13 – 15, and 15 – 18), all of which are available in the Topic Library. Some examples of these prompts include Does pineapple belong on a pizza? Ancient Athens or Sparta: Which was the better place to live? and Are price caps a useful economic tool? Alternatively, the teacher can create their own relevant and controversial prompt, such as Mobile phones should be prohibited in K–12 classrooms. After selecting a premade prompt or composing their own, the teacher clicks the icon labelled Skip Rest and Create, and the debate is ready for students.
To invite students into the debate, the teacher can post a QR code, email a hyperlink to it, or link it to their students’ KE accounts, which the teacher or the students can create. After students have joined the debate, they contribute to it by clicking the green Pros + or red Cons + icon and then posting their Claim(s): reasons and evidence, for or against the prompt.
Critical Thinking and Argumentative Writing Skills
After students have posted their Claim(s), the teacher can facilitate incrementally challenging learning tasks to develop their critical thinking and argumentative writing skills. For example, to hone analytical skills, the teacher can model and then assign students to deconstruct and label their peers’ arguments according to their constituent parts, that is, reasons and evidence, by using the Comment feature.
If more substantive conceptualizations of arguments are taught, most notably, Toulmin’s model (2003), students can also label warrants (i.e., explanations connecting the Claims and evidence, often unstated), backings (i.e., support for warrants) and qualifiers (e.g., may, probably and likely).
Or, to practise evaluative skills, teachers can guide students in critiquing the evidence in their peers’ Claims. For scaffolding, teachers can model questions from the CRAAP Test (California State University, 2010), an evaluation framework based on Currency (time), Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purposefulness. As an illustration, consider the teacher’s response to the student Leila’s evidence: “Leila, excellent evidence, the article is from a reliable source, Time Magazine, uses accurate information and is written to inform the public, but it is about college students. Do you think an article about K to 12 students would be more relevant? Also, it is a little old. Should a more current article be used?”
Or, to develop students’ argumentative writing skills, teachers can underscore essential components of argumentative writing, such as counterarguments. Take, for example, the following interaction between the student Jacob and the teacher: Jacob posts, “Although a few students use mobile phones to help them learn stuff like math, many students use mobiles to cheat, way too many. Actually, many of my friends secretly use websites on their phones in math class to do their assignments.” In response, the teacher writes, “Excellent writing! I like how you respectfully address an opposing viewpoint right away and add the qualifier ‘many’ to show it’s not true in all circumstances. Both aspects add credibility to your Claim.”
Classroom Management and Assessment
There are also intuitive features to assist with classroom management and assessment. For example, teachers can animate shy students or those who fear making public mistakes with the Small Group Mode. With this mode, teachers can randomly or selectively move students into private, small-group debates, that is, socially less risky environments. Or with the Anonymous Participation, teachers can anonymize student names, replacing them with colour-animal names like Orange Butterfly and Blue Rabbit. Anonymity can reduce student convergence to group norms and may promote argumentation in online environments (Ainsworth et al., 2011).
But anonymous online participation can embolden some students to post insensitive comments. To address this issue, teachers can utilize the Roles feature. With it, teachers can assign one of three roles to students: the Writer role, which enables students to post freely; the Viewer role, which restricts students to view postings only; or the Suggestor role, which allows students to write posts that, before being made public, require teacher approval. By assigning this last role to students, the teacher can vet comments and ensure a safe, respectful, and inclusive learning environment.
Regarding assessment, teachers can use the Info & Stats feature, which displays the number of Claims, Contributions (i.e., replies to other students’ Claims), and Votes for each student, to intervene with minimally engaged students proactively or assign grades based on participation. Moreover, with the Grading and Feedback feature, teachers can assign numerical grades ranging from 0 to 10 and provide written feedback on individual Claims and provide an overall grade and summative written feedback to each student. Grades can be continuously entered and then released, publicly or privately, when appropriate to each student.
Pedagogical Recommendations
Below are some recommendations to facilitate engaging, safe KE-mediated debates, pre-, during, and post-debate.
Pre-Debate
To ensure that students can fully participate, teachers should facilitate activities that familiarize students with the debate topic and explicitly teach argumentation. Useful activities include using engaging topic-related videos and readings followed by group brainstorming discussions and think-pair-shares; and providing direct instruction about the structure of an argument followed by argumentative writing tasks scaffolded with sentence starters, model texts, and direct written feedback. Before a debate, expectations regarding the number of required posts, for instance, Claims and Contributions, should be made clear to students. Furthermore, reviewing principles of civility, that is, respectfulness, tolerance, and consideration (Cormier & Brighouse, 2019) is necessary, too. Effective strategies include collaboratively deconstructing, comparing, and discussing examples of civil and uncivil KE-mediated arguments and, while doing so, highlighting key disagreeing and interrupting phrases, for instance, “Well said, but I think…”, “I see your point; however, from my perspective…” and “May I jump in here?”
During Debate
During the debate, teachers should moderate arguments regularly, sensitively, and strategically. Scheduled moderation creates teacher presence, and this presence should include praising insightful and thoughtful posts and intervening when arguments go awry, for instance, when they become heated or go off-topic. To mediate tense arguments, restating students’ conflicting opinions publicly can calm emotions and close dialogue. Or, if the argument has already grown hostile, locking the debate and privately messaging the combative students to investigate (Salmon, 2012) may be necessary. When posts drift off-topic, sifting through them and deliberately weaving relevant ideas and comments together in a realigning post can steer discussions back on topic (Salmon, 2012).
Additionally, teachers should avoid commenting on content and instead focus on scaffolding critical thinking and argumentative writing skills. To illustrate, if a student replies to another students’ posting with merely an affirmation (e.g., I agree), then encouraging the student to elaborate on their reasoning by asking questions like “Could you add anything more to X?” or “To what degree do you agree with X?” fosters both skills. Caution is needed when moderating, though, because too much can dampen online peer-to-peer dialogue (Mazzolini & Maddison, 2003). Finally, to conclude an argument, summarizing Claims and points of interest (Salmon, 2012) in the Group Chat is effective.
Post-Debate
Following the summary, the teacher can lead a reflective discussion in the Group Chat with some questions, guiding students to ponder their argumentation, communication and application. Some apt questions include “Has anyone changed their stance? If so, why?” “How well did you communicate your reasons, evidence and counter arguments?” and “How will this debate change your thoughts and actions inside or outside of the classroom?” Lastly, since consensus-making is a key skill in life and debating is about, in the words of Branham (1991), creating a marketplace of ideas—declaring a winning side can be unnecessary; instead, guiding students in devising a compromise to or consensus with the thesis may be a more beneficial way to end a debate (Newman, 2020).
Conclusion
With the free-of-charge, intuitive and cross-platform website KE, teachers can create, manage, and assess casual, safe, and cross-curricular written debates with students from the ages of eight and upward. Through these text-based debates, teachers can scaffold students in developing their critical thinking and argumentative writing skills, for instance, analyzing, evaluating, and responding to opposing views, through pre-, during and post-debate activities. Whilst necessary to perform many personal and academic tasks, critical thinking and argumentative writing, more importantly, are 21st century skills that hold potential to save “young people from the echo chamber of social media” (Newman, 2020, p. 27) and enable them to engage in constructive disagreement and avoid abuse and violence (Newman, 2020).
Resources
Debate and Speech Foundation Canada: https://www.speechanddebatecanada.com/ materials-for-debating
Different models of arguments: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/historical_perspectives_on_argumentation/index.html
Different kinds of evidence: https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/evidence-writingessays
References
Ainsworth, S., Gelmini- Hornsby, G., Threapleton, K., Crook, C., O’Malley, C., & Buda, M. (2011). Anonymity in classroom voting and debating. Learning and Instruction, 21(3), 365–378. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2010.05.001
Branham, R. J. (1991). Debate and critical analysis: The harmony of conflict (1st ed.). L. Erlbaum Associates. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203812846
California State University. (2010). Evaluating information—Applying the CRAAP Test. Meriam Library. https://library.csuchico.edu/sites/default/files/craap-test.pdf
Cormier, A.-A., & Brighouse, H. (2019). Creating civil citizens? The value and limits of teaching civility in schools. In C. Macleod & C. Tappolet (Eds.), Philosophical perspectives on moral and civic education (1st ed., Vol. 1–Book, Section, pp. 68–85). Routledge. https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315146928-5
Delamain, C., & Spring, J. (2021). Teaching critical thinking skills: An introduction for children aged 9–12 (1st ed., Vol. 1). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429342042
Facione, P. A. (1990). Critical thinking: A statement of expert consensus for purposes of educational assessment and instruction. Research findings and recommendations. https://go.exlibris.link/YxnQc911
Hillocks, G., Jr. (2011). Teaching argument writing, grades 6-12: Supporting claims with relevant evidence and clear reasoning. Heinemann. https://go.exlibris.link/yKsbk8pQ
Irvin, L. L. (2010). What is academic writing? In C. Lowe, P. Zemliansky, & C. Charlton (Eds.), Writing spaces: Volume 1, readings on writing (pp. 3–17). Parlor Press. bit.ly/4hG67F0
Mazzolini, M., & Maddison, S. (2003). Sage, guide or ghost? The effect of instructor intervention on student participation in online discussion forums. Computers and Education, 40(3), 237–253. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0360-1315(02)00129-X
Newman, D. (2020). The noisy classroom: Developing debate and critical oracy in schools (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351020220
Salmon, G. (2012). E-moderating: The key to online teaching and learning (3rd ed.). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203816684
Toulmin, S. (2003). The uses of argument (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511840005
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Errol Pitts
Errol Pitts is a teacher with over twenty years of teaching experience. His professional interests include teaching with digital technologies, adult education, and second language acquisition. He graduated with an M.Ed., B.Ed., and B.Sc.
This article is featured in Canadian Teacher Magazine’s Winter 2026 issue.
